Singing career

In 2007, at age 15, Bennet moved to China to pursue a singing career,[5] under her birth name, Chloe Wang (汪可盈).[2] While in China, Bennet lived with her paternal grandmother and studied Mandarin,[5] in Shanghai[9] or Beijing. Back in the US, she released two singles, both in 2011: "Uh Oh" and "Every Day in Between".[10]

While pursuing an acting career in Hollywood, she changed her name to "Chloe Bennet," after having trouble booking gigs with her last name. According to Bennet, using her father's first name, rather than his last name avoids difficulties being cast as an ethnic Asian American while respecting her father.[7][12]

In 2017 she was cast in a musical remake of the 1983 film Valley Girl as Karen, the "Queen Bee".[17] The film was scheduled for release in June 2018, but has been postponed due to controversy around one of its cast members, Logan Paul.[18]

Chloe was awarded the "Visionary Award" by East West Players, the longest-running professional theater of color in the United States, on April 21, 2017, at their annual gala.[19] She dedicated her award "to all the little girls who want to be a superhero; I'm just a half Chinese girl from the southside of Chicago."[20]

Personal life

"I think what's really dangerous with what, continuously, is happening with Asian-Americans in Hollywood is there's a narrative that white Hollywood, or just any other ethnicity really in Hollywood gives to Asian-Americans that, 'You're the butt of the joke.' They're determining that we're the nerds, that we're the shy girls or that the guy that can't be sexy because he's an Asian man."

Bennet has described the American film and television industry as racist against Asians. In a 2016 interview, she noted, "Oh, the first audition I went on after I changed my name [from Wang to Bennet], I got booked. So that's a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works."[23] In September 2017, after actor Ed Skrein stepped down from his role as Major Ben Daimio in the then-in production film Hellboy following backlash over the fact that Skrein, a white man, was playing Daimio, a character who is Japanese-American in the Hellboy comics, Bennet wrote a since-deleted post on Instagram in which she applauded Skrein's decision, and addressed her own experiences as an Asian actor in Hollywood, saying, "Changing my last name doesn't change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese. It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn't cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable."[23]